How the Delhi gang-rape has changed Indian women forever

Embarrassed in case her friends overheard, the young woman I was saying goodbye to spoke in almost a whisper. “I probably wouldn’t catch the bus back to your hotel if I were you and it’s better if you don’t go back alone in an auto-rikshaw. I wouldn’t anyway.”


I had been interviewing students at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) for a special Woman’s Hour programme for BBC Radio 4. It’s a mixed college and the women students here have a reputation for being firebrands. Many of the female students I spoke to were preparing to take to the streets for last week’s Valentine’s Day One Billion Rising March. The Brainchild of Eve Ensler, the playwright behind the Vagina Monologues, It was one of the biggest international protests by women for women, calling for an end to physical and sexual violence around the world.


Just six months ago such advice, coming from an otherwise sassy would be marcher, would have struck me as both ironic and ridiculous. On this occasion I received it with thanks. I’m no stranger to Delhi, it was only three in the afternoon and the journey would barely have taken 10 minutes. Yet even though I hate to admit it, I was relieved my producer was travelling in the same direction and would drop me off in his taxi on the way to the bureau.


New Delhi, the crowded, colourful and cheerfully bonkers city that I have both worked and played in, feels like a foreign territory to me now. It has been redefined by a single act of unspeakable violence which may yet change the very fabric of India.


On December 16 last year, a 23 year-old woman and her male companion were on their way home from the movies. In a residential area in upmarket South Delhi, not far from the JNU campus, they caught what they thought was a private bus. Many such vehicles operate in the city where middle class’s demands are outstripping government infrastructure.



As they got on they noticed six male passengers on board. Almost immediately they began to taunt the woman, making lewd comments about her ‘boyfriend.’ The situation escalated quickly, and while the driver kept the vehicle moving, they battered the woman’s companion with a tyre iron.

As she fought to protect him, the men dragged her to the back of the bus and gang-raped her. As the bus kept moving, the rapists changed places with the driver so he could have his turn. Behind the tinted windows, they used the iron bar to sexually violate her, causing such horrific internal injuries that she later died.






The fact that the victim was a student and that she had been taken from an affluent suburb of Delhi made the press take note in an unprecedented manner. Frightened editors had daughters who moved in the same parts of the city, and so the story saturated India’s many rolling news networks, and dominated the front pages of the papers.

Suspects were arrested within 24 hours, yet that did nothing to sate the rage growing throughout India. Just six months before, news channels were running looped footage of a school girl being stripped and sexually assaulted on the streets of Guwahati in Assam. Fifty men were involved and the whole incident was caught on camera.

Even though the faces of the mob were clearly visible, police made only a handful of arrests. It seemed to prove what women’s groups had been saying for years. When it comes to violence against women in India - the police do little, the courts do less and society often vilifies the victim for somehow ‘asking for it’.

However, after several million Indians witnessed the ordeal of the helpless and utterly blameless Guwahti schoolgirl on their TV’s, the Delhi bus rape tipped them over the edge. A mass protest for women’s rights seemed to grow over night. Those who voiced the ‘old attitudes,’ were met with condemnation.rape victim in New Delhi, India

“Disgusting man and disgusting words,” was how Shabana Azmi legendary Indian actress turned social activist described Asaram Bapu, an influential spiritual leader who waded into the post-rape debate.

“He told the world that the victim should have taken God’s name. She could have held the hand of one of the men and called him brother. By failing to do that she was partly to blame for what happened. We will not stand for such rubbish any longer”.

Azmi is one of many high profile Indian women who have come out to demand the Indian government takes action. “Things need to change from top to bottom and the lawmakers need to lead the way.”
The government's actions have been unusually swift

In response the government commissioned a retired Chief Justice, Jagdish Sharan Verma, to recommend legal changes which might better protect Indian women. The 631 page report was released on January 24. Verma’s committee had taken some 80,000 submissions before making sweeping recommendations which were startling in their scope.

They looked not only at rape but also acid attacks, child sexual abuse, the practice of stripping and humiliating women in public, the abuse of women by the army in conflict zones and perhaps most startlingly of all, rape within marriage. Although most in India were aware that such things went on, never before had they been presented with such damning clarity.

I personally couldn’t believe how far Verma had gone, and how quickly. His committee had wrapped up proceedings in just 29 days, in a country where the legal cogs turn at a maddeningly slow pace. A friend once wailed to me, “Indians take the urgency out of manyana,” and anyone who has fallen foul of the endless bureaucracy there can sympathise.
Change is thankfully happening in India

However the speed of Verma’s report and the largely warm response to it convince me that things are changing quickly in India. Almost overnight, the appallingly arcane turn of phrase used to describe public groping as “eve-teasing” has been replaced with what it really is: sexual assault. The message is spreading beyond the urban elite of the capital. While visiting my family in Kanpur I was stunned at how politically literate my female relatives had become. Never before have I heard them speaking of their “rights”.

My young nieces have been posting angry blogs questioning the way in which they have been brought up, not just by their parents but by teachers too. “I’m not a precious statue that needs to be wrapped up and protected, I want to breathe the air as freely and safely as my brother,” posted one.

In a land that worships goddesses in temples, it seems finally as if flesh and blood women are on the verge of getting better treatment than their mothers. Why? Because they are asking for it.